under law; art, science, politics, trade, all actively awake; life as a whole, we may say, in universal motion. Academies and schools had multiplied on all sides. Of universities alone, as many as sixty-six were established before the year 1517, the date of the Reformation. Some of these were almost incredibly large. That of Paris formed a sort of commonwealth or state, within its own limits. Students and teachers were congregated there from all nations. Thought had acquired prodigious force, and stood ripe for the most brilliant exploits in literature and science. To talk of the revival of classic letters, the art of printing, the discovery of America, and other such agencies, as origi nating the scientific spirit of modern Europe, is infantile simplicity. Such powers were themselves possible only through the action of mind already awake, and only for such mind could they have been of any account. It required some culture, to welcome the learning of ancient Greece and Rome, when it was again brought to light. Men on the verge of barbarism take no pleasure in reading Plato; the songs of Pindar have no particular music for their ear; neither the strength of Thucydides, nor the grace of Herodotus, are apt to engage their taste. No importation of letters from Constantinople or anywhere else, would raise into enthusiasm the torpid mind of Mexico or China. "The very fact of the Reformation itself," as a distinguished Roman Catholic ecclesiastic has said, "presupposes a time, whose leading representatives occupied a very high grade of intellectual life; a period less awake, and possessed of only small furniture in the way of knowledge, could neither have produced it nor met it with proper support. Let any one compare with the Protestant Reformation the later dissensions of the Greek Church, and he must almost loathe their insignificance and want of character. The separation which took place from the Latin Church in the sixteenth century, on the contrary, both in the objects it sought, and in the principles from which it sprang, reveals something grand and full of meaning, reflecting thus a brilliant light, against its own will, on the Church it left behind, and in its very blame covering her with praise. Who can survey, without ad miration, the polemic powers brought into action on both sides? Indeed the writings of Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Chemnitz

and Beza, on the one side, and the works of an Eck, Catharinus, Cochlaeus, Albert Pighius, Sadolet, Fisher, Thomas More, Reginald Pole, Vega, Andrada, and Bellarmine, on the other, in point of keen intelligence, eloquence and learning, afford a rare treat, which were it not embittered by other considerations, might be counted perfect. We know moreover, that the Reformers did not drop at once from heaven, when they first undertook to set the world right. It is no secret, where Luther went to school, whose instructions were enjoyed by Melancthon, who it was that put Calvin, still a little boy, into the use of a benefice, that the talent he saw in him might not go without means for its proper cultivation. The papal legate too is not unknown, to whom Zuingli was indebted, at the close of his academical studies, for a yearly pension, enabling him to enlarge his library."

This way of looking at the subject, as it is infinitely more rational, seems to us also, we confess, to be vastly more complimentary to the Reformation itself, than the view we have just seen taken of it by Kirwan. The Reformation would be a very small affair, if it had sprung up like the mushroom of a night, from such a compost of pure ignorance and corruption, as his theory supposes the whole Church to have been before. The true glory of it, and its only sure vindication in the end, are found just in this, that it did not fall from the clouds, nor creep forth from a corner (the valleys of Piedmont for instance); but that it was the product of the old Catholic Church itself, and the very channel in which was carried forward the central stream of its history, the true significance of its life. The notion that all was dark before the sixteenth century, and that then all suddenly became light, however generally current at one time, is now fairly exploded. It is a fiction worthy only of the nursery, which, in truth, kills itself, and must sooner or later be hissed out of the world.

So far is it from being true that the Roman Church stood opposed systematically to learning, her zeal for it was urged against her at times, as implying a want of true interest in religion. Her

* Mæhler's Schriften und Aufsaetze. Vol. II. pp. 12, 13. Considerations on the state of the Church in the fifteenth century and first part of the sixteenth.

theology was held to be too scholastic. Even Melancthon himself, at one time complained of the attention given to Plato in christian schools. It is generally made the reproach of Leo X. and his cardinals, that their taste for the classics spoiled all their relish for the Bible. The pope, at all events, ranked first among the patrons of polite learning. He it was, the scholar of Politian and Chalcondylas, the friend of Picus and Marsilius, who sent the Greek, John Lascaris, back to his own country, to purchase up manuscripts of the classics and of the Greek church fathers; who invited young men of talent, in large numbers, from Greece into Italy, to give instruction there in their native tongue; who made it his business to encourage so many deserving men, by pensions and in other ways, to devote their lives to the cause of science. The revival of letters was not a consequence strictly of the Reformation; just as little as we can say that our modern civilization in general, starts from it as its ultimate cause. It contributed powerfully, no doubt, to the whole course of mind since, and may be taken, indeed, as the indispensable condition of its universal progress; but the necessity for such progress lay far back of this particular revolution itself, in the previous state of the christian world. Europe could not wake into full life, without the Reformation; but the waking itself, was something more broad and deep, which simply came to its most signal expression in this great fact.

"A reformation in the higher sense of the word," it has been finely remarked by Ullmann, " is always a vast historical result; the outlet of a spiritual process that has extended through centuries; a deep all-constraining necessity, brought to pass indeed by the free action of great men as its chosen organs, which yet in its essential character rests on a comprehensive mass mind, that cannot be produced at will, but gradually forms itself with irresistible force out of the inmost wants of life. In such a continuous spiritual formation process, however, there must be before all things, an actuating positive soul or centre; for what is merely negative, doubt, rejection, the denial of what is at hand, is not sufficient by itself alone, to unite the minds of men in this massive way, and to hold them thus in tension through centuries, moving in a fixed direction. Neither in the physical world, nor

in the moral, can any organic and enduring creation ever take place, except from the ground of a living fruitful germ, which holds in itself previously in the way of real power, all that is actually unfolded from its life; and this germ is always something positive, which first asserts its own existence, and only then, in order to win room for free growth, opposes and thrusts aside what is foreign and obstructive to its own nature. This general law we perceive also in every movement, that can at all lay claim to the dignity of a reformation in the sphere of religion. Reformation is a forming over again, a restoration of life. But in the conception of such a religious life-restoration, three things are essentially involved. First, it is a going back to something already given, and original; for a reformation, as distinguished from the first founding of a religion or ecclesiastical constitution, seeks not to make something entirely new, but only to renew what is already made; it moves always, accordingly, in a fixed historical sphere or tract, and loses its character when this tract is forsaken. Secondly, it is not a mere going back, a passive acknowledgment of the original, or a desire towards it, but above all an active bringing back of its power, a real renovation of that old faith in the form of life; this particularly constitutes its practical positive nature; it is a great historical fact, but one that rests on a given ground, clearly understood and acknowledged in the general consciousness, and which, for this very reason, forms itself again the foundation for farther development, new spiritual superstructure. Lastly, however, it lies also in the nature of a reformation, that it contends against what is false and sets aside what is out of date, that its "position" takes the form also of "opposition;" for the idea of renewing an original, implies that this original has in the course of time undergone distortion and falsification, that corruptions cleave to it which need to be removed; and to have free room for the new growth, what has run its course requires to be pruned away. Still a reformation, of the right sort, is never mere destruction as such, but always creation, involving destruction only as its unavoidable accident and condition." All these requirements meet, according to Ullmann, in the religious revolution of the sixteenth century. It was no accident, but an act which proceeded from the inmost

and deepest life of the world, and formed the grand turning point of its universal modern history. Such an act is not rationally conceivable, without vast presuppositions. "A world-historical epoch of this sort requires, like a gigantic oak, deep, far reaching roots, and firm solid ground, out of which to have grown. It betrays a poor sense of history, to seek the explanation of all here in single personalities or transient interests. These elements, indeed, must not be overlooked; but the truly great, the general, the enduring in history, springs from other and deeper grounds. Individuals make it not; they serve it rather, and become great just by this, that they do so with clear conscious conviction and full resolution, and the greater and more powerful always, in proportion as that is the case." The grandeur, and glory, and world-wide significance of the Reformation, stand precisely in this, that the forces which finally brought it to pass, had been maturing their strength and struggling in the same direction, for centuries before; so that the sense of ages might be said to become complete in the end by its presence.

In conclusion, with all becoming respect for the worthy author of these Letters, and the fullest confidence in the integrity of christian purpose with which they have been written, we are bound to say that we think them suited to do harm rather than good. We like not their anti-catholic temper and tone, disguised under the show of opposition merely to Popery and Rome; the rationalistic, nay, even radical, affinities and tendencies, that to our mind at least, make themselves painfully prominent in their whole character. We deprecate the spread of such views and feelings, in the holy name of Protestantism. We must say, in all solemn earnestness, we wish no such atmosphere of thought ever to reach the education of our own children. We would train them rather to faith in the idea of the Church, and sympathy with the articles of the ancient Creed. "Would to God that you could see things as I see them," Kirwan exclaims in one place, not without feeling, to Bishop Hughes. The bishop would say with equal earnestness, no doubt: "Would that you could see them as they appear to me." It is very certain, that they move in different worlds, with little power on the part of either to understand truly the position of the other. The bishop